This post was published long before the Mists of Pandara Expansion.
The tips and techniques explained here may be outdated.

What goes around.. keeps going around...

Our timeline.BC: Warlocks hit lifetap to get mana back by sacrificing health. Some (bad) warlocks hit LOTS of lifetaps all at once scaring the healers. Warlocks cackle maniacally.

Wrath Development(late 2008): Blizz consolidates gear so Warlocks are sharing gear with priests and mages. This means that everyone will be getting Spirit gear now. Warlocks have NO use for spirit.

Oct 2008: On the Beta, Blizz say “Lifetap will now scale with spirit instead of Spellpower” (“I got spirit, yes I do“)(“scales with” meaning the tap will take away more health and award an equal amount of mana. The calculation is 710 + (3 * SPI))

Wrath launches.Feb 2009: Blizz introduces the “Glyph of Life Tap”(“It’s the end of the world as we know it“)(you gain 20% of your spirit as spell power for xx sec)
Warlocks start tapping throughout the fight to keep the buff up. Spirit is finally worth something 2 SPI = 1 SP in calculations.

Dec 2009: Blizz updates the Felhound so that it does decent damage and regnerates more mana than it’s using even when all-out attacking. (“My pet’s better than your pet“)
Affliction warlocks switch to using the Felhound.

January 2010: Blizz introduces T10 armor. Warlock T10 has very little spirit on it.
Blizz also updates Glyph of Life Tap so that it sometimes procs when Dark Pact is used.
Warlocks begin specing out of Improved Life Tap and into Dark Pact (Life Tap scales with spirit which we have less of.. and Dark Pact can also trigger the Glyph’s bonus).

Since we’re in Cataclysm Development.. I wonder if they’ve decided to remove Spirit from a Warlock’s “must have” list for stats. Even further.. I wonder if they’re moving spirit off of gear.. We -still- have to share gear with Priests and Mages.. I wonder if that gear will be spirit-less.

In fact, now that I think of it.. I think they said they wanted to make Spirit be something that only healers cared about.. so maybe they’re moving that into the talent trees. That’d be spiff.

9 comments to What goes around.. keeps going around…

From what I can recall from reading in Cataclysm notes is that spirit is going to become a background stat. Blizz will be rolling it into mp5 and spirit will not be itemized on gear any longer. I will admit that my memory may be faulty but that may be somewhere to start looking.

When I puts on me shadow priest transmogrifier, I finds what I gotta choose between gear with +hit and +spirit a lots. But since I don’t raid, I don’t need the hit, and I gets 30% of me spirit turned inta spellpower. Which means the holy/disc priest T9 gear is better fer me than the T9 shadow gear. Is fuhggin’ silly.
.-= Ratshag´s last blog ..Is The Return Of The Fantsy-Pants Vampire =-.

Glad. This is a nice step toward simplifying the armor builds on our gear. I personally never quite liked stacking spirit on my gear. Gemmed out of it last time, heading for haste whenever possible.
.-= elkagorasa´s last blog ..Pet Collectors: Start farming mats =-.

I like the option to have more than one way to build an Affliction Lock. Some people have been stacking Spirit (Me) and others have been going haste. I would like to think I am doing pretty well against them as I will out DPS other Locks with the same gear score or even higher. I am not sold on the T10 gear. I will am currently mixing gear with the non Tier gear and will decide on the T10 stuff later.

This made me think about the people that are really pushing for a third spec slot. I do feel there needs to two specs so you can play with different specs but anything more and it is just too much. Make your toon and run with it. Off topic..

It will be interesting to see how they design buffs around the new stat system. I am a little worried that we will lose some identity and spell casters will just be spell casters.. Time will tell though.

Now that Blizzard is ready to make sweeping changes to itemization, I expect we’ll see much more of this in the near future. This step is logical if you consider the Spellpower to Intellect move — consolidate all the miscellaneous stats into Spellpower and then convert it to Intellect for DPS classes.

What we’ll likely see is clearer itemization between DPS and Healing cloth classes, which is both good and bad. I quite like getting use out of the old world +Spirit gear with my Glyph of Life Tap.

The other thing I’m really noticing is how compressed the T9 to T10 upgrade is, due both to gear inflation in ToC as well as laying the groundwork for Cataclysm. The lack of Spirit on T10 shouldn’t really come as a surprise in retrospect.
.-= Cynwise of Stormwind´s last blog ..Upcoming Battleground Changes in 3.3.3 =-.

From Blue:
“Spirit – Come Cataclysm, this stat should only be found on healing gear. Non-healing casters will have other systems in place to regenerate mana, and we are designing special solutions for Elemental shaman and Balance druids who often share gear with healers (more on this below). Raid buffs that currently boost Spirit (such as Blessing of Kings) will only boost the primary stats of Stamina, Strength, Agility, and Intellect. We are also likely changing the five-second rule and other quirks of the current regen system.”
.-= Nim (Ankh)´s last blog ..Twitter Question Of The Week =-.